


Talisman

by aoife_hime



Category: New Girl
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 06:39:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aoife_hime/pseuds/aoife_hime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, there was a little girl who had one wish...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Talisman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [osprey_archer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/gifts).



There was a time when Jess was a child that she wished rather hard for an awfully long time for just one thing. Every day, she would wake up and wish, eyes closed so tightly that her nose wrinkled and her face felt pinched. She would even hold her breath for good measure, though she wasn’t sure whether or not that step was important. She thought perhaps it might have been – it was possible to interrupt a wish, after all, and everyone knew an interrupted wish was a worthless wish.

Her cheeks were always pink by the end of the wish, and her lungs always burned, but after that initial gasp of air, she would nod once in satisfaction and hop out of bed to get ready for the day. Every hour after that was another hour during which her wish could come true. She looked forward to each and every one of them at first because she knew such a powerful wish couldn’t go unanswered for long. But she was young, and at that age a day seemed as long as a year. A week seemed as long as an age, and by the time an entire month went by, it seemed to Jess that she had spent her entire life wishing.

She first blamed her parents for not buying her the shiny pink plastic wand from the toy store, the one that lit up and played music. That had to have been a better wand than the one she fashioned for herself out of a couple twigs and some construction paper. Her mom said it was just as good but Jess knew there was no magic in her wand. But when blonde Stephanie brought her shiny pink plastic wand to school and Jess was able to make a wish with it, she realized that maybe being shiny and plastic wasn’t enough magic after all.

Next, she blamed herself for not wishing properly. Not all magic happened with wands, she remembered, and people on the television were always using long words that sounded old and grown-up when making wishes. Jess tried one morning to imitate them but instead ended up getting the words twisted around in her head until they came out all wrong. She knew precisely why her wish didn’t come true that day. After that, she decided to stick with the words she knew.

(Not that it seemed to help any, but at least she knew what she was wishing for.)

She tried wishing on stars, but inevitably she would end up wishing on an airplane instead. Watching the light fade away into the distance was a bit like watching her wish move farther and farther away. She tried wishing on clovers, but she never found one with four leaves. For a moment one day, she considered trying to wish on one of those hot pink rabbits feet that came in the quarter machines at the grocery store, but that idea became unappealing the moment she saw a real bunny on her walk to school.

Jessica Day kept wishing every morning. She wished and she wished until the day when she found an elephant.

It wasn’t a real elephant she found that morning on the walk to school. The little stuffed animal was laying next to the sidewalk, the fake jewels that covered its body catching the light and making it sparkle. When she picked it up, she found it was soggy and heavy and smelled strongly of wet grass. One of its eyes was missing and what cloth could be seen beneath the jewels was threadbare and faded.

Politely so as not to offend it, Jess asked it its name. The elephant didn’t respond. Jess dug her twig wand out of her backpack and tapped the elephant three times on the nose. Still, it remained silent (her wand really had no magic, why couldn’t her parents see that?).

“Well, if you’re not going to tell me your name, elephant, then you’re going to have to come with me until I can find your owner,” she informed it as she tucked it under her arm and walked the last two blocks to school.

She brought the elephant with her to school every day for the next week, but even though she asked every kid she saw, she couldn’t find its owner. It seemed like a hopeless search and Jess was ready to give up; she failed the elephant in the same way that she failed at wishing.

It was a very dark time in young Jess’s life. And it didn’t end until the day she (accidentally) bit someone.

\---

(“Jessica Day, what does this report mean? Did you really bite another student?!”

“Mom, it was an accident!”)

\---

It happened at recess. There was a kickball game someone had started and Jess managed to bother her way onto a team. She ended up playing outfield, naturally, which meant that she got to sit and weave dandelions together because nobody could kick quite hard enough to get past the dirt of the baseball diamond. Nobody except Ryan Stenz, that is. Jess was seated quite a ways back in the outfield when he landed a soaring kick that sent the ball rocketing towards her. She ended up trampling her dandelion chain as she stumbled forward to try and reach the ball before it hit the ground.

Jess had never been an excellent runner; she was all long arms flailing about and awkwardly short strides. She tried to convince her feet forward this time in hopes that, if she made the catch, perhaps next inning they’d allow her to play third base. Jess was so caught up in her hopes, however, that she failed to notice that the current occupant of third base was the snobby, pretty girl from her team and said girl seemed to be completely unaware that she was part of a very competitive kickball game. In fact, she had been staring at her nails for the last 10 minutes at least, that was how much attention she was paying to the game.

After a certain point, it was inevitable. The girl continued to stand near third and Jess continued to run. In the end, Jess collided teeth-to-cheek with the third baseman and they both ended up landing hard in the dusty dirt of the baseball diamond.

A collective gasp rang out amongst everyone else on both teams.

“OW! That was my face!”

Jess looked up. She could taste metal and there was something warm dripping from her nose, which turned out to be blood. Her face also felt mostly numb in a way that meant she would most likely regret it when feeling returned.

“I’m sorry?” she mumbled confusedly even as she was hauled back inside by the teacher on recess duty. The other girl came too and she spent the entire trip yelling at Jess for being clumsy and a weird biting child no matter how many times the teacher tried to assure her that what happened was an accident.

“She bit my face,” the girl emphasized, her finger poking the tender flesh of her cheek as she did so. “What kind of person bites someone else?”

“I said I was sorry,” Jess muttered. Her cheeks were red with embarrassment and she wanted nothing more than to melt away on the spot. Only evil witches melted in water, though, so perhaps it was a good thing that she couldn’t disappear from the nurse’s office using just a glass of water.

If she had a magical wand that worked, maybe she could magically make it so her teeth never connected with the girl’s face. If she had a magical wand that worked, maybe she wouldn’t have even wanted to play kickball in the first place because her wish would have come true by now.

Stupid twig wand. Stupid wishes.

The other girl ended up leaving the nurse’s office with nothing more than a band aid for a scrape on her hand. She didn’t even glance back at Jess, who sat in one of the uncomfortable orange chairs with an ice pack on her swollen, bloody lip. The girl's footsteps in the empty hallway had long since faded and she was likely back in her classroom before Jess realized she didn’t know the name of the person she had unintentionally bitten.

“That girl? That’s Cece Meyers, dear,” the old nurse informed her when she asked. “I wouldn’t worry about her too much - she's a sweet girl. Just give her some time to cool off.”

But Jessica Day was bad with giving time. Approximately three hours later, Jess was bumping into people and jostling them out of the way as she called Cece’s name out and ran down the hallway.

“Why are you stalking me?”

“Because I just wanted to say I’m sorry about earlier.”

“Fine, you’re sorry. Could you leave me alone now?”

But that wasn’t something Jess was all that good at, either. She ended up walking home with Cece that day and then having to call her parents from Cece's phone and ask for a ride home from Cece’s house. She had apologized the entire walk back, only taking a break to breathe. 

The same thing happened the next day, and the next. Every day after school, Jess would apologize for the entire fifteen minutes it took to walk from the school’s front doors to Cece’s house and every day Cece would roll her eyes and let Jess talk her ear off.

After a week or so of apologies, Jess began rambling about other things, like what sorts of homework she had or what her teacher had said about her poster on the rainforest. She talked about clouds and the sky and caves and baking cookies with her mother. She talked about saving the world and playing the piano and how Billy Bradshaw had big, smelly feet. She talked about caterpillars and books, about sandwiches and goldfish. Jess talked about everything during those walks. And Cece, well, Cece continued to roll her eyes and listen.

\---

(“Do you ever shut up?”

“Yes.”

“Liar.”)

\---

One day, though, the pattern changed. Jess was in the middle of a monologue about flowers when Cece planted her hands on Jess’s shoulders and forced her to stop walking about three blocks away from Cece’s home. Jess’s talk of tulips and sunflowers was cut short as Cece reached into Jess’s partially unzipped backpack and pulled out something that had been threatening to fall out of the backpack with every bounce and spin Jess had just made during her speech.

“Where did you get this?” she demanded. It took Jess a few moments to figure out what it was that Cece was waving in front of her face, but then the sunlight caught on the jewels of the stuffed elephant’s body. She had almost forgotten it was in her backpack by this point. She couldn’t find an owner despite weeks of trying and eventually Jess had taken to simply carrying it around in her backpack along with her folders and books.

“I found it a while ago. It was just sitting on a lawn on my way to school. It looked sad.”

Cece, as usual, rolled her eyes and let out a huff of annoyance. “Sidd doesn’t look sad, Jess, that’s just ridiculous. He’s a stuffed elephant with a smile sewn on his face.”

“… Sidd?”

“It’s short for Siddharth.”

“That’s… a nice name?”

“He’s named after the boy my mom wants me to marry.”

Jess’s face scrunched up at the thought of marrying anyone, let alone someone named Sidd who possibly looked like an elephant. “Marry? Like with kissing and cooties?”

“I thought if I got rid of the elephant version of Sidd, I could get rid of the real Sidd too,” Cece continued, staring at the stuffed toy with a vaguely frustrated expression on her face.

“Did you get rid of the real Sidd?”

And here, Cece smiled. There was an almost evilly triumphant look in her eyes that made Jess want to gulp and take a few steps back. She didn’t do either, but it was a close thing. “Yes. It was easier getting rid of the stuffed animal than the real Sidd, but in the end he got the message. And I made him cry. Real Sidd, not elephant Sidd,” she added quickly as Jess opened her mouth to ask the inevitable question.

Jess wasn’t surprised, but she didn’t say as much to Cece.

They walked the rest of the way home with their usual roles reversed: Cece continued talking about Sidd and the elephant while Jess listened. Before they got to Cece’s house, Cece shoved Sidd back in Jess’s backpack. He was their secret.

The girls ran straight up to Cece’s room that day, giggling the entire way.

\---

(“You can keep him, you know.”

“But he’s your husband! Isn’t that wrong?”

“I don’t mind sharing.”

“CECE!”)

\---

Jess liked having a secret. And the more she spent time with Cece, the more secrets they had. They were all wonderful secrets, warm and cozy and precious. Jess had never had secrets like these before; usually the only thing she kept secret was when she shoved her peas into her napkin and dumped them in the compost heap after dinner. Secrets with Cece were better than uneaten vegetables.

More than secrets, though, Jess liked that she had someone with whom to keep that secret. As she lay awake in bed one night thinking that, she realized something equally as important:

Her wish had finally come true.

From the glow of her nightlight, she could see Sidd sitting on her dresser. In the dim light, his jewels flashed dimly, but that only made him seem more magical. He certainly was more magical than any magic wand Jess had ever used, that much was certain.

“Thanks for your help, Mr. Sidd,” she whispered.

Sidd’s jewels twinkled in response.

\---

(“So, Jess, what you’re telling me is that I can’t touch your stuffed elephant because it is actually a sacred magical beast who brought you your first real friend?”

“Yes, Nick, that is what I am saying.”

“Do you realize how ridiculous you sound right now?”

“But it’s true! Sidd brought Cece and me together! Without him, we never would have become friends!”

“You’re crazy. You really are.... wait… did that elephant just _sparkle_ at me?”

“I told you, he’s magical.”)

**Author's Note:**

> osprey_archer, you are a wonderful prompter. I adored every prompt you gave. I'm not entirely sure where this fic came from, but I hope you have found it enjoyable (well, you and anyone else who has decided to read this fic and has made it to the end notes).


End file.
